Your weekends may be safe, admins – IT giants tout 'zero outage' tech

No more call-outs if HPE, Cisco et al live up to promise (stop laughing at the back)

Tech's big names have jumped into bed together to create an industry standard that's supposed to make products less prone to failure in the cloudy era.

Founding members include HPE, Cisco, Brocade, HDS, Dell EMC, Fortinet, Juniper, NetApp, SAP, SUSE and integrator T-Systems. The plan is to work on a Zero Outage framework including certification: the “common goal” will be to “maximise availability” by “improving stability and security” with the creation of best practises. The group stated:

The digital world is increasingly dependent on IT. A technical defect, human error or untrained process execution can be a threat to everyday operations. Therefore manufacturers and service companies are growing a sense of urgency for an uninterruptible supply of their services.

The tech titans said they wanted to spark a debate in the IT world, bring onboard more members and seek out ways to “specify consistent errors response times, employee qualification levels and security and platform requirements.”

ITIL remains the standard for service management, and while the industry uses standardised components in much of the computing gear sold, there is no single defining standard.

The timing is interesting given the continued adoption of cloud services, with many of the hardware players involved the framework trying to remain relevant.

Playing the bingo buzzword game, Dell customer chief officer Richard Nicolas scored a full house, claiming the group will focus on “eliminating outages while navigating the digital shift, and resiliency in a world of heterogeneous ICT.”

Similarly, Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board at SAP, said customers expect round the clock service availability and Zero Outage is “our ultimate goal.”

A spokesman for the Zero Outage association said a certification is due in 2017 where applicants will be required to "meet certain criteria," and guidance on best practice will be collated and stored centrally for IT makers and staff to adopt.

"Additionally we [will] work long term within our association to determine best ways on how vendors can enable their products, firmwares and software to be managed easier by a service provider across an infrastructure," said the spokesman.

"One example might be to enable more predictable patch cycles for firmware. Another could be design principles to enable even complex infrastructure updates without downtime or required reboots." ®